05/10/2015

Ultra JankenSquad Forever playtest

We had a pretty good playtest of Ultra JankenSquad Forever at the lovely Cardiff BRAWL's All Day Roleplaying event yesterday.

JankenSquad (for short) is my anime-inspired, Rock-Paper-Scissors RPG system. It makes for an easy, fun and quick game with a lot of player power. The emphasis is definitely on the roleplaying rather than any complex rules simulation. That's fairly obvious though, given the simplicity of the R-P-S system. Having each of the three choices represent an approach to a situation, rather than a specific action or skill, gives the players a huge amount of freedom, which they seemed to enjoy. It does mean the GM has to be on top of everything and represent NPC and environment challenges fairly.

One issue is that it can be a bit easy for players to overcome challenges, given that they always have at least a one in three chance of beating the GM in a check. This isn't necessarily so bad, though, as long as the story is moving along fine and the players are having fun. The GM could always require several successes to resolve a problem or something like that. Also, it can sometimes be fairly obvious what the "correct" approach to a situation is (for example, Guile/Paper would always seem to be the right approach to a stealthy situation). This can be overcome by everyone bearing in mind that each of the three approaches can be applied to any situation. In the stealth example Resolve/Rock can represent careful, slow movement, Guile/Paper can represent outmanoeuvring/outwitting the enemy and Aggression/Scissors can represent dashing from cover to cover.

I've been thinking about writing up the rules and making them available online as a PDF or something. Maybe I'll sell a deluxe edition with pretty pictures for a modest fee. I'll add this to my list of projects to do.